


The Doctor at War

by spire_kite



Category: Doctor Who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-16
Updated: 2016-04-16
Packaged: 2018-06-02 13:32:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6568294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spire_kite/pseuds/spire_kite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The War Doctor fights his war.  But to what end?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Doctor at War

**Author's Note:**

> I was generally disappointed with "The Day of the Doctor." John Hurt gave a good performance as "the War Doctor," but I found the material and general concept of having a "War Doctor" rather off-putting. And while I was glad that they didn't try to depict the Time War in detail and then botch it, I was still a little disappointed they didn't try.  
> When it comes to the Time War, I have a vision of something epic, something more like what Tennant hinted at in "The End of Time." What we got in "The Day of the Doctor" was a lot of red and green lasers going through the air and a new flying Dalek design .  
> So shortly after the Fiftieth Anniversary Special, I started writing this: a proper backstory for the War Doctor, as he fights an increasingly losing battle of mythic proportions, at once detailing him as a character and giving a brief view of the sheer scope of the Time War. I've been picking at it ever since and have finally decided to post it. So here you go.

War. Endless war. War unlike anything that the multiverse, anything all of Known Causality had ever seen. A Time War. THE Time War.

I fought in it. In it, on it, through it, around it, between it; in every direction and in all capacities, I fought. Dropping Writhing Fire onto Novira Three. Ferrying refugees off Endeavor Alpha. Releasing saboteur-beetles into the shipyards of Kalvax Central. Shoring up Obstinance Barricades across Tyronix 9. Stringing wraith fissures, unseen and expectant, across the no man’s lands; through nameless tracts of open space. For days, then weeks, then decades, as the war went on, I fought. And still the war went on.

 

I rode Blement’s third moon as it fell in fiery ruin, detonated the charges to swerve its billowing devastation around, back into the heart of the very fleet that had killed it.

 

It was I who succeeded in assassinating Andandus the Immortal/s; Andandus “THE HYPER REAL;” taking out all twelve of the self-entangled traitor’s’ simultaneous iterations with a single shot; much to his/their/his surprise. And my own, to be honest.

 

I was in Ginnungagap when the Nowhere Man fell defending his post; was one of the few to make it out alive as the Neverwases overran the potentiality bridges and came swarming into reality.

 

I fought.

I fought across miles of scarred and desecrated planets. Walking over the bodies of old friends, new friends, enemies turned ally, still others I never knew. Stalking abandoned battlefields splattered with oil, radiation, and Dalek protoplasm; picking off survivors as the wind clinked between smoldering carapaces.

Fought until the blood washed against me in waves.

Fought until even a man born for battle and fashioned for combat could take no more.

 

Literally endless war. Watching as the Time Lords became increasingly desperate; retroverting whole generations, whole civilizations, and throwing them into the conflict. Resetting entire battlefields, only to watch them crash, scream, and burn all over again.

I’ve seen New Byzantine fall nineteen different ways. Nineteen before I stopped counting.

The war refused to be won. The war COULD not be won.

 

I fought even as the waves and hollows, the flow and function of Time itself, became twisted, pitted, irreparably creased, warped, inverted, deranged.

Until it was no longer poetic, no longer even vaguely figurative, but a simple observable fact: Time was literally bleeding.

 

And I made the TARDIS crawl through it. I pushed her wheezing and kicking through the swirling disease all around us.

Sent her churning through oozing pools of cauterized and congealing milliseconds.

Made her leap from one cataract of decaying centuries to the next.

Shoved her right out of anything remotely resembling her element to hurtle, swirling and spinning, over the final abyss itself.

My TARDIS. I pulled her into the war when I joined. She has become— No. I’ve used her. As a blockade, as a shield, as a sniper’s nest, as a troop carrier, as a sick bay. A morgue. As a battering ram, a weapons depot, finally just as a mallet with which to lash out and smash things.

I dearly and truly wish she that should never forgive me. All the worse as she never seems to have blamed me to begin with.

 

And. Still. I. Fought.

 

I fought until I saw, far later than I should have, that the war could never be won. That it could only ever end.

That I had to end it.

 

 

It really is the most basic of all strategy; even the thickest schoolchild intuitively understands it. When the game is going badly, kick over the board.

Rasalon’s final plan to destroy and escape Time in its entirety, and the support it garnered, forced me to realize what I should have understood long ago: the Time Lords were gone. Everything they had ever stood for had been lost fighting a war they never imagined they could lose.

I was alone.

This is the truth I burn with, as I step into the impenetrable weapon vaults below Gallifrey and make off with The Moment. This is the fact I remind myself of, as I race, half-real in the TARDIS, past the trenches; over the last standing bastions and the soldiers struggling to hold them. This is the lie I find myself repeating, as I waft over the refugee camps, past huddled hopefuls that know nothing of the machinations of madmen.

Which makes it all the more horrific when I realize I’m still going to do it. That despite all the innocent lives I’ll be sacrificing should I choose this, still choose it I do. That this has to end. That I want this to end. That I have no more ideas. I have had all the time, ALL OF TIME, in which to scheme, to struggle, to cheat, to fight; all that has happened is I have run out of things to think. I have thrown everything I have at this war; IT HAS TAKEN EVERYTHING FROM ME. And it has only continued to grow darker, more demented. More meaningless.

This is literally the last thing I can think to do. If it does not work, I can not even imagine what I will try next.

Part of me still desperately hopes that it will fail.

But it won’t.

 

The Moment. 

That’s all it takes, is a moment. A pivot around which Time can be not just re-written but redefined. Fixed points are gelatin before it. Anything can happen. If you really, I mean really, think you know what you’re doing, you could twist reality around, swing all causality on its ear and wrench it about into whatever course you think best. One last bid for sanity. One more grab for resolution. One final grand, daring, convoluted plan that just might work and save the day.

Or.

Or you could turn it inside out and swallow everything into an inescapable prison. Pull all the genies into their bottles. Slice away the diseased tissue. Create a time lock unlike anything the multiverse has ever seen and just seal all your troubles up inside. All of it. No gimmicks. No finesse. No mistakes. No hope. Just a blunt, total break that lets you know the story’s over, no matter how little sense that makes.

The Moment.

You only ever get one.

 

I fly over spent battlefields and empty cities; pass ruins compiled from a thousand eras, patchworks of haphazard landscapes carelessly tossed together, then abandoned. Miles ahead, on my left, an explosion goes off. It bursts in a crimson bloom and erupts upwards in a pillar of fire; surging as if it will scorch the heavens themselves; then stops, frozen. With a hiccup, it blips out of existence; a second later, it starts all over; bursts, erupts, rushes as if to singe the sky. As if this time, THIS TIME, it can not possibly be stopped; this time it must surely make it. Endlessly. I steer the TARDIS around it and sail on.

 

I feel old. I can not remember the last time I felt this ancient.

I am old and I have made far, far too many mistakes. I know better than to trust in mere omnipotence alone to prevail.

 

I am over the Open Wastes now; empty expanses left unruined by virtue of their never having been anything to begin with. I’ll find a place out here, somewhere in the middle of this featureless, innocent desolation, and set down. Then begin arming The Moment.

Soon.

 

And amidst all the myriad realizations that have come to torment me this day, one in particular now sits heavily upon my mind.

That those life witches deceived me that fateful night, oh so many years ago. I don’t know why I should be surprised.

They made me believe I needed to be reborn, that I had to grip down and pull some vast and terrible monster up from my soul; all in order to fight a war and save a universe.

When in the end

There is no warrior that can win this war

Nor any savior that can rescue this universe.

No.

In the end

To make an end

All there is

Is a tired old man

Willing to steal from his own people

And then run away.

 

Again.


End file.
